Wisdom, Wit, and Pathos of Ouida

SIGNA

In the garden of these children all the flora of Italy was gathered and was growing.

The delights of an Italian garden are countless. It is not like any other garden in the world. It is at once more formal and more wild, at once greener with more abundant youth and venerable with more antique age. It has all Boccaccio between its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves, all Raffaelle in its skies. And then the sunshine that beggars words and laughs at painters!—the boundless, intense, delicious, heavenly light! What do other gardens know of that, save in orange-groves of Granada and rose thickets of Damascus?

The old broken marble statues, whence the water dripped and fed the water-lily; the great lemon-trees in pots big enough to drown a boy, the golden globes among their emerald leaves; the magnolias, like trees cast in bronze, with all the spice of India in their cups; the spires of ivory bells that the yuccas put forth, like belfries for fairies; the oleanders taller than a man, red and white and blush colour; the broad velvet leaves of the flowering rush; the dark majestic ilex oaks, that made the noon like twilight; the countless graces of the vast family of acacias; the high box hedges, sweet and pungent in the sun; the stone ponds, where the gold-fish slept through the sultry day; the wilderness of carnations; the huge roses, yellow, crimson, snow-white, and the small noisette and the banksia with its million of pink stars; myrtles in dense thickets, and camellias like a wood of evergreens; cacti in all quaint shapes, like fossils astonished to find themselves again alive; high walls, vine-hung and topped by pines and cypresses; low walls with crowds of geraniums on their parapets, and the mountains and the fields beyond them; marble basins hidden in creepers where the frogs dozed all day long; sounds of convent bells and of chapel chimes; green lizards basking on the flags; great sheds and granaries beautiful with the clematis and the wisteria and the rosy trumpets of the bignonia; great wooden places cool and shady, with vast arched entrances, and scent of hay, and empty casks, and red earthen amphoræ, and little mice scudding on the floors, and a sun-dial painted on the wall, and a crucifix set above the weather-cock, and through the huge unglazed windows sight of the green vines with the bullocks in the harvest-carts beneath them, or of some hilly sunlit road with a mule-team coming down it, or of a blue high hill with its pine-trees black against the sky, and on its slopes the yellow corn and misty olive. This was their garden; it is ten thousand other gardens in the land.

The old painters had these gardens, and walked in them, and thought nothing better could be needed for any scene of Annunciation or Adoration, and so put them in beyond the windows of Bethlehem or behind the Throne of the Lamb—and who can wonder?

In these little ancient burghs and hillside villages, scattered up and down between mountain and sea, there is often some boy or girl, with a more wonderful voice, or a more beautiful face, or a sweeter knack of song, or a more vivid trick of improvisation than the others; and this boy or girl strays away some day with a little bundle of clothes, and a coin or two, or is fetched away by some far-sighted pedlar in such human wares, who buys them as bird-fanciers buy the finches from the nets; and then, years and years afterwards, the town or hamlet hears indistinctly of some great prima donna, or of some lark-throated tenor, that the big world is making happy as kings, and rich as kings' treasurers, and the people carding the flax or shelling the chestnuts say to one another, "That was little black Lià, or that was our old Momo;" but Momo or Lià the village or the vine-field never sees again.

The heart of silver falls ever into the hands of brass. The sensitive herb is eaten as grass by the swine.

Fate will have it so. Fate is so old, and weary of her task; she must have some diversion. It is Fate who blinded Love for sport, and on the shoulders of Possession hung the wallet full of stones and sand—Satiety.

As passion yet unknown thrills in the adolescent, as maternity yet undreamed of stirs in the maiden; so the love of art comes to the artist before he can give a voice to his thought or any name to his desire.

Signa heard "beautiful things" as he sat in the rising moonlight, with the bells of the little bindweed white about his feet.

That was all he could have said.

Whether the angels sent them on the breeze, or the birds brought them, or the dead men came and sang them to him, he could not tell. Indeed, who can tell?

Where did Guido see the golden hair of St. Michael gleam upon the wind? Where did Mozart hear the awful cries of the risen dead come to judgment? What voice was in the fountain of Vaucluse? Under what nodding oxlip did Shakespeare find Titania asleep? When did the Mother of Love come down, chaster in her unclothed loveliness than vestal in her veil, and with such vision of her make obscure Cleomenes immortal?

Who can tell?

Signa sat dreaming, with his chin upon his hands, and his eyes wandering over all the silent place, from the closed flowers at his feet to the moon in her circles of mist.

Who walks in these paths now may go back four hundred years. They are changed in nothing. Through their high hedges of rhododendron and of jessamine that grow like woodland trees it would still seem but natural to see Raffaelle with his court-train of students, or Signorelli splendid in those apparellings which were the comment of his age; and on these broad stone terraces with the lizards basking on their steps and the trees opening to show a vine-covered hill with the white oxen creeping down it and the blue mountains farther still behind, it would be but fitting to see a dark figure sitting and painting lilies upon a golden ground, or cherubs' heads upon a panel of cypress wood, and to hear that this painter was the monk Angelico.

The deepest charm of these old gardens, as of their country, is, after all, that in them it is possible to forget the present age.

In the full, drowsy, voluptuous noon, when they are a gorgeous blaze of colour and a very intoxication of fragrance, as in the ethereal white moonlight of midnight, when, with the silver beams and the white blossoms and the pale marbles, they are like a world of snow, their charm is one of rest, silence, leisure, dreams, and passion all in one; they belong to the days when art was a living power, when love was a thing of heaven or of hell, and when men had the faith of children and the force of gods.

Those days are dead, but in these old gardens you can believe still that you live in them.

"Pippa!" echoed Istriel. His memories were wakened by the name, and went back to the days of his youth, when he had gone through the fields at evening, when the purple beanflower was in bloom.

"What is your name then?" he asked, with a changed sound in his voice, and with his fair cheek paler.

"I am Bruno Marcillo; I come from the hills above the Lastra a Signa."

Istriel rose, and looked at him; he had not remembered dead Pippa for many a year. All in a moment he did remember: the long light days, the little grey-walled town, the meetings in the vine-hung paths, when sunset burned the skies; the girl with the pearls on her round brown throat, the moonlit nights, with the strings of the guitar throbbing, and the hearts of the lovers leaping; the sweet, eager, thoughtless passion that swayed them one to another, as two flowers are blown together in the mild soft winds of summer; he remembered it all now.

And he had forgotten so long; forgotten so utterly; save now and then, when in some great man's house he had chanced to see some painting done in his youth, and sold then for a few gold coins, of a tender tempestuous face, half smiling and half sobbing, full of storm and sunshine, both in one; and then at such times had thought, "Poor little fool! she loved me too well;—it is the worst fault a woman has."

Some regret he had felt, and some remorse when he had found the garret empty, and had lost Pippa from sight in the great sea of chance; but she had wearied him, importuned him, clung to him; she had had the worst fault, she had loved him too much. He had been young and poor, and very ambitious; he had been soon reconciled; he had soon learned to think that it was a burden best fallen from his shoulders. No doubt she had suffered; but there was no help for that—some one always suffered when these ties were broken—so he had said to himself. And then there had come success and fame, and the pleasures of the world and the triumphs of art, and Pippa had dropped from his thoughts as dead blossoms from a bough; and he had loved so many other women, that he could not have counted them; and the memory of that boy-and-girl romance in the green hill country of the old Etruscan land had died away from him like a song long mute.

Now, all at once, Pippa's hand seemed to touch him—Pippa's voice seemed to rouse him—Pippa's eyes seemed to look at him.

It was very early in the morning.

There had been heavy rains at night, and there was, when the sun rose, everywhere, that white fog of the Valdarno country which is like a silvery cloud hanging over all the earth. It spreads everywhere and blends together land and sky; but it has breaks of exquisite transparencies, through which the gold of the sunbeam shines, and the rose of the dawn blushes, and the summits of the hills gleam here and there, with a white monastery, or a mountain belfry, or a cluster of cypresses seen through it, hung in the air as it were, and framed like pictures in the silvery mist.

It is no noxious steam rising from the rivers and the rains: no grey and oppressive obliteration of the face of the world like the fogs of the north; no weight on the lungs and blindness to the eyes; no burden of leaden damp lying heavy on the soil and on the spirit; no wall built up between the sun and men; but a fog that is as beautiful as the full moonlight is—nay, more beautiful, for it has beams of warmth, glories of colour, glimpses of landscape such as the moon would coldly kill; and the bells ring, and the sheep bleat, and the birds sing underneath its shadow; and the sun-rays come through it, darted like angels' spears: and it has in it all the promise of the morning, and all the sounds of the waking day.

A great darkness was over all his mind like the plague of that unending night which brooded over Egypt.

All the ferocity of his nature was scourged into its greatest strength; he was sensible of nothing except the sense that he was beaten in the one aim and purpose of his life.

Only—if by any chance he could still save the boy.

That one thought—companion with him, sleeping and waking, through so many joyless nights—stayed with him still.

It seemed to him that he would have strength to scale the very heights of heaven, and shake the very throne of God until He heard—to save the boy.

The night was far gone; the red of the day-dawn began to glow, and the stars paled.

He did not know how time went; but he knew the look of the daybreak. When the skies looked so through his grated windows at home, he rose and said a prayer, and went down and unbarred his doors, and led out his white beasts to the plough, or between the golden lines of the reaped corn; all that was over now.

The birds were waking on the old green hills and the crocus flowers unclosing; but he–

"I shall never see it again," he thought, and his heart yearned to it, and the great, hot, slow tears of a man's woe stole into his aching eyes and burned them. But he had no pity on himself.

He had freedom and health and strength and manhood, and he was still not old, and still might win the favour of women, and see his children laugh—if he went back to the old homestead, and the old safe ways of his fathers. And the very smell of the earth there was sweet to him as a virgin's breath, and the mere toil of the ground had been dear to him by reason of the faithful love that he bore to his birthplace. But he had no pity on himself.

"My soul for his," he had said; and he cleaved to his word and kept it.

In his day he had been savage to others. He was no less so to himself.

He had done all that he knew how to do. He had crushed out the natural evil of him and denied the desires of the flesh, and changed his very nature to do good by Pippa's son: and it had all been of no use; it had all been spent in vain, as drowning seamen's cries for help are spent on angry winds and yawning waters. He had tried to follow God's will and to drive the tempter from him, for the boy's sake; and it had all been of no avail. Through the long score of years his vain sacrifices echoed dully by him as a dropt stone through the dark shaft of a well.

Perhaps it was not enough.

Perhaps it was needful that he should redeem the boy's soul by the utter surrender and eternal ruin of his own—perhaps. After all it was a poor love which balanced cost; a meek, mean love which would not dare to take guilt upon it for the thing it cherished.

To him crime was crime in naked utter blackness; without aught of those palliatives with which the cultured and philosophic temper can streak it smooth and paint its soft excuse, and trace it back to influence or insanity. To him sin was a mighty, hideous, hell-born thing, which being embraced dragged him who kissed it on the mouth, downward and downward into bottomless pits of endless night and ceaseless torment. To him the depths of hell and heights of heaven were real as he had seen them in the visions of Orgagna.

Yet he was willing to say, "Evil, be thou my good!" if by such evil he could break the bonds of passion from the life of Pippa's son.

He had in him the mighty fanaticism which has made at once the tyrants and the martyrs of the world.

"Leave him to me," he had said, and then the strength and weakness, and ruthless heat, and utter self-deliverance of his nature leaped to their height, and nerved him with deadly passion.

"There is but one way," he said to himself;—there was but one way to cut the cords of this hideous, tangled knot of destiny and let free the boy to the old ways of innocence.

"He will curse me," he thought; "I shall die—never looking on his face—never hearing his voice. But he will be freed—so. He will suffer—for a day—a year. But he will be spared the truth. And he is so young—he will be glad again before the summer comes."

For a moment his courage failed him.

He could face the thought of an eternity of pain, and not turn pale, nor pause. But to die with the boy's curse on him—that was harder.

"It is selfishness to pause," he told himself. "He will loathe me always; but what matter?—he will be saved; he will be innocent once more; he will hear his 'beautiful things' again; he will never know the truth; he will be at peace with himself, and forget before the summer comes. He never has loved me—not much. What does it matter?—so that he is saved. When he sees his mother in heaven some day, then she will say to him—'It was done for your sake.' And I shall know that he sees then, as God sees. That will be enough."

The boy looked out through the iron bars of his open lattice into the cold, still night, full of the smell of fallen leaves and fir cones. The tears fell down his cheeks; his heart was oppressed with a vague yearning, such as made Mozart weep, when he heard his own Lacrimosa chanted.

It is not fear of death, it is not desire of life.

It is that unutterable want, that nameless longing, which stirs in the soul that is a little purer than its fellow, and which, burdened with that prophetic pain which men call genius, blindly feels its way after some great light, that knows must be shining somewhere upon other worlds, though all the earth is dark.

When Mozart wept, it was for the world he could never reach—not for the world he left.

He had been brought up upon this wooded spur, looking down on the Signa country; all his loves and hatreds, joys and pains, had been known here; from the time he had plucked the maple leaves in autumn for the cattle with little brown five-year-old hands he had laboured here, never seeing the sun set elsewhere except on that one night at the sea. He was close rooted to the earth as the stonepines were and the oaks. It had always seemed to him that a man should die where he took life first, amongst his kindred and under the sods that his feet had run over in babyhood. He had never thought much about it, but unconsciously the fibres of his heart had twisted themselves round all the smallest and the biggest things of his home as the tendrils of a strong ivy bush fasten round a great tower and the little stones alike.

The wooden settle where his mother had sat; the shrine in the house wall; the copper vessels that had glowed in the wood-fuel light when a large family had gathered there about the hearth; the stone well under the walnut-tree where dead Dina had often stayed to smile on him; the cypress-wood presses where Pippa had kept her feast-day finery and her pearls; the old vast sweet-smelling sheds and stables where he had threshed and hewn and yoked his oxen thirty years if one: all these things, and a hundred like them, were dear to him with all the memories of his entire life; and away from them he could know no peace.

He was going away into a great darkness. He had nothing to guide him. The iron of a wasted love, of a useless sacrifice, was in his heart. His instinct drove him where there was peril for Pippa's son—that was all.

If this woman took the lad away from him, where was there any mercy or justice, earthly or divine? That was all he asked himself, blindly and stupidly; as the oxen seem to ask it with their mild, sad eyes as they strain under the yoke and goad, suffering and not knowing why they suffer.

Nothing was clear to Bruno.

Only life had taught him that Love is the brother of Death.

One thing and another had come between him and the lad he cherished. The dreams of the child, the desires of the youth, the powers of art, the passion of genius, one by one had come in between him and loosened his hold, and made him stand aloof as a stranger. But Love he had dreaded most of all; Love which slays with one glance dreams and art and genius, and lays them dead as rootless weeds that rot in burning suns.

Now Love had come.

He worked all day, holding the sickness of fear off him as best he could, for he was a brave man;—only he had wrestled with fate so long, and it seemed always to beat him, and almost he grew tired.

He cut a week's fodder for the beasts, and left all things in their places, and then, as the day darkened, prepared to go.

Tinello and Pastore lowed at him, thrusting their broad white foreheads and soft noses over their stable door.

He turned and stroked them in farewell.

"Poor beasts!" he muttered; "shall I never muzzle and yoke you ever again?"

His throat grew dry, his eyes grew dim. He was like a man who sails for a voyage on unknown seas, and neither he nor any other can tell whether he will ever return.

He might come back in a day; he might come back never.

Multitudes, well used to wander, would have laughed at him. But to him it was as though he set forth on the journey which men call death.

In the grey lowering evening he kissed the beasts on their white brows. There was no one there to see his weakness, and year on year he had decked them with their garlands of hedge flowers and led them up on God's day to have their strength blessed by the priest—their strength that laboured with his own from dawn to dark over the bare brown fields.

Then he turned his back on his old home, and went down the green sides of the hill, and lost sight of his birthplace as the night fell.

All through the night he was borne away by the edge of the sea, along the wild windy shores, through the stagnant marshes and the black pools where the buffalo and the wild boar herded, past the deserted cities of the coast, and beyond the forsaken harbours of Æneas and of Nero.

The west wind blew strong; the clouds were heavy; now and then the moon shone on a sullen sea; now and then the darkness broke over rank maremma vapours; at times he heard the distant bellowing of the herds, at times he heard the moaning of the water; mighty cities, lost armies, slaughtered hosts, foundered fleets, were underneath that soil and sea; whole nations had their sepulchres on that low, wind-blown shore. But of these he knew nothing.

It only seemed to him, that day would never come.

Once or twice he fell asleep for a few moments, and waking in that confused noise of the stormy night and the wild water and the frightened herds, thought that he was dead, and that this sound was the passing of the feet of all the living multitude going for ever to and fro, unthinking, over the depths of the dark earth where he lay.

To behold the dominion of evil; the victory of the liar; the empire of that which is base; to be powerless to resist, impotent to strip it bare; to watch it suck under a beloved life as the whirlpool the gold-freighted vessel; to know that the soul for which we would give our own to everlasting ruin is daily, hourly, momentarily subjugated, emasculated, possessed, devoured by those alien powers of violence and fraud which have fastened upon it as their prey; to stand by fettered and mute, and cry out to heaven that in this conflict the angels themselves should descend to wrestle for us, and yet know that all the while the very stars in their courses shall sooner stand still than this reign of sin be ended:—this is the greatest woe that the world holds.